


Afterlife: Fireball Cinnamon Whiskey, Vintage 1984 HCE

by CopperCaravan



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Alcohol, Depression, Drunkenness, Fera Shepard, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-25
Updated: 2015-07-25
Packaged: 2018-04-10 22:25:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4410095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CopperCaravan/pseuds/CopperCaravan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set at the beginning of Mass Effect 2; Shepard has a few drinks, makes eyes at a bartender, and starts to work through her issues.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Afterlife: Fireball Cinnamon Whiskey, Vintage 1984 HCE

Shepard can shoot.

In anyone’s hands, a pistol is deadly. In Shepard’s hands, a pistol is deadly accurate.

But tonight, Shepard isn’t shooting her gun. Probably. Tonight, Shepard is shooting whiskey.

Tomorrow, she tells herself. Tomorrow she’ll start cleaning this place up—righting wrongs, saving lives, recruiting teammates. But not tonight. She’s not had a moment to herself since she woke up, nevermind a stiff drink. _And don’t I at least deserve_ —but she shakes her head and takes another shot because no, no she probably doesn’t. But nobody in this galaxy has been getting quite what they deserved for quite a while. And she’s special, sure—came back from beyond the far horizon—but she’s not _that_ special.

“Shepard,” Miranda had said. “I must insist that you don’t wander off alone. You’ve only been back for a few days and if—”

“Miranda,” Shepard had responded. “I must insist that you climb the fuck off my back.”

Jacob had snorted, but straightened up immediately when both women had turned around to look at him, eyes sharp and full lips pursed.

And now, she’s in Afterlife. Doesn’t know a damn person here and no one but the notorious Aria T’Loak herself knows that Shepard is Shepard. And there’s whiskey to be had.

But not near enough.

“Had enough yet, sweetheart?” The Batarian at the bar leans toward her and gestures to her many, _many_ shot glasses.

“If I recite the Batarian alphabet backwards, will you give me another shot?”

He laughs then, and all his annoyance with whatever’s had him up-in-arms tonight is melted away by her strangely disarming sarcasm. “I’ll give you another if you don’t,” he says. He thinks she looks familiar, but that always happens in bars, particularly bars on Omega.

She admires him a moment too long: the dark eyes, the colourful skin, the unexpectedly sincere grin. She thinks that he’s rather pretty, in a way that makes her feel like she should set herself on fire. She’s supposed to hate him. Supposed to hate every single Batarian in the whole damn galaxy. What would her family think if they could see her now, drinking herself stupid on Omega and making eyes at a Batarian barkeep while the Collectors abduct innocents and cart them off to gods-know-where? They’d be as disgusted with her as she is with herself, surely.

_But, no,_ she thinks. _They wouldn’t._ Her family was too good for this shit. Too good for what she’s become. Too good for Reapers and Collectors and Batarian raiders. Too good for all of this.

She nods at the barkeep and he slides over another shot.

Shepard could knock them back before, could drink the best of them under the table. She’ll be damned if her cybernetics and implants and synthetics are going to stop her from drinking. _Maybe I’ll get lucky,_ she thinks. _And the damned things will short out and fry me._ But Miranda had assured her, in great medical detail, that that would not be the case. Jacob had thought that perhaps she’d be unable to get drunk at all, which was, in Shepard’s opinion, a far worse fate.

But she’s hitting number 16— _or is it 17?_ —and the buzz is coming fast. Not like the kind of buzz that slopes along the insides of your eyes as you whittle away beer after beer by a campfire in the woods. Not like the kind of buzz that makes you loose and warm and calm and makes your problems seem like they’ll be lighter tomorrow. This is the kind of buzz that comes all at once and heavy and prickling inside your forehead; the kind that ends with you in an alley, bruised and bloody and impressed that your biotics didn’t decimate a whole damn street. This is the kind of buzz that reminds you just how goddamn angry you are. At everything.

The bartender returns from his short journey to the other end of the bar, carrying with him another shot and a glass of water. He slides them both toward her.

“Here,” he says. “Consider it complimentary for not causing as much trouble as your kind usually cause after that much to drink.”

She lifts the water, tips it toward him. “To you... uh...”

“Garak,” he says.

“To you, then, Garak. Best damn bartender on this station.”

He chuckles, amused by her gesture or by her slurring she doesn’t know. But it doesn’t matter. “Thanks.”

“Consider it complimentary,” she says. She almost winks at him, but the skin on her face still hurts and she gets caught up in being self-conscious about the glowing crevices splitting her open and by the time she’s decided, it’s too late anyway. She wonders if Batarians wink with one eye or two.

And then she drinks her water like a good drunk, quick as if it were a shot too.

“And that one?” Garak asks, tipping his head toward her shot—her _last_ shot, she decides.

She thinks really briefly—really, really briefly—about toasting herself just for the hell of it. Just for the laugh she’d get. _To Commander Shepard, dead in the black over Alchera. May she decompose in peace, goddamnit._ But she decides against that. She’d be the only one laughing.

She draws her fingertip around the rim of the little glass, and if Shepard had been anyone else, or anywhere else, or any when else, she’d have cried thinking of all the people who weren’t with her—all the people she’d lost in some fashion or another.

She thinks back—not so far back as Mindoir because that’s just cruel—but back to when it all started, this fight.

“For Richard Jenkins,” she says, laughing just a little. “A wonderfully idealistic goddamn idiot who couldn’t read a handsignal if you slapped him.”

Garak laughs again and Shepard’s taken in by how dark his beautiful eyes are.

“And for Nihlus Kryik,” she continues, her words a bit louder and slurring just a bit more in the midst of her laughter. “Pretentious, evasive Turian bastard. And who would’ve been...” The laughing stops and that’s ok, because she doesn’t know if it was humor or hysteria.

“And who would’ve been,” she continues, “a damn good friend to have.”

Garak pours another shot, but instead of sliding it toward her, he caps his bottle (very nearly emptied by her in the two hours she’s been here).

“Hell, you know what Garak?” She _sounds_ drunk. She can hear it. She doesn’t bother trying to hide it either.

“What?” He says, smiling and holding his own shot.

“One for Saren Goddamn Arterius too. What a fu—” But she stops when the words rip the breath right out of her and just looks down at the bar. She gets quiet, her voice barely audible above the ambient noise of Afterlife. “Didn’t have to go out the way he did, Garak. That’s all.”

She sighs. “Turians, Garak. Turians are never around when you need them.” And she doesn’t let herself think of her favourite Turian—the one she is only slightly surprised to find that she misses more than anyone else. She doesn’t let herself think of blue tattoos and headshot counts and drinks in the Mako during off-shift while everyone sleeps but her and Wrex and— _shit._

She lets herself stew for a couple more seconds and Garak, who has by now been avoiding his duties as bartender for a good seven minutes, nudges her arm with his knuckles. She looks at her pretty Batarian barkeep and thinks that she’ll be damned if she goes down drunk and sad. “Make a toast, Garak!” Her voice is loud again, loud and pretending to be the good kind of drunk.

“To you, my friend.” He raises his shot and grins. “May you never have to drink this shit human whiskey ever again!” He barks out a laugh and Shepard finds herself caught up in not just the sound of it, but the sight as well.

It’s the kindest thing anyone’s offered her in a long time, certainly in the few days that she’s been back. She thinks about telling him that, thinks about wrapping her arms around his neck and dragging him back to the New Normandy and locking the door of her terrible _Captain’s Quarters_ behind her. She thinks about how this must mean something, how it must be a prophecy, how the words of a bartender on Omega must be how the galaxy promises that she won’t lose anyone else, that she won’t be here in this bar forever drinking herself back to the Shepard she thinks she is.

But she doesn’t let herself go that far. _One small victory at a time,_ she thinks. She hits his glass with her own, half of their alcohol sloshing out and dripping down their wrists, and yells “To you too, Garak. For being the best damn barkeep on this station twice-over and ridiculously easy on the eyes!”

And she winks at him.

**Author's Note:**

> re: title - HCE is Human Common Era, a "galactically conscious" spin on the dating tradition of Common Era/Before Common Era
> 
> I also feel the need to clarify that I, personally, do not think Fireball is "shit human whiskey." It's actually a very versatile shot, but there's no accounting for Batarian taste, I suppose.


End file.
